Lesson 37

What are you doing?

Lesson contents:

Always watch the video without subtitles first in order to train your ears! It's a good idea to watch several times until you feel the "music", before watching the version with subtitles. Your pronunciation will be much better if you follow this rule.

Teachers:

This is the classic clip and lesson on the Present Continuous (or "Present Progressive", if you prefer), providing extensive practice for beginners and pre-intermediate students. The most basic use of this tense becomes self-evident as we see people telling us what they are doing whilethey do it.

Exercise 6 in this lesson reminds us of this most basic use, and seems ironic in context. Exercises 7 and 8 use a completely different video from the main one. No one talks. We simply see people doing things. Exercise 7 is an MC quiz while exercise 8 is good for writing practice in the classroom.

In upcoming lessons we will see how the same verb tense is used:
- to describe longer actions in progress, for example, "He is studying to become a doctor".
- for actions in the near future. For example, "She is meeting her boyfriend in a bar tonight". This is the same as "She is going to meet her boyfriend in a bar tonight".
- for actions which are repeated, with adverbs like "always" or "constantly". For example, "I don't like those people because they are always making trouble".